More group projects for Wharton?

After a year of scavenger hunts and pie-eating contests, the Yen cohort has come out on top.

The group claimed the freshmen Cohort Cup yesterday at an end-of-the-year freshmen celebration in Huntsman Hall.

This celebration marked the end of the first year of the Undergraduate Cohort program, introduced last fall for the Wharton Business School's Class of 2010 to provide students with better social networks.

The program separates classes into nine smaller groups, named after international currencies, based on which MGMT 100 section freshmen take during their first semester.

Once Wharton administrators added another mandatory freshman class in the second semester, BPUB 250, "we had two courses that everyone could take, and so we were able to go forward with the cohort system," Marketing professor Barbara Kahn said.

Kahn added that the primary goal of the program was to "help create a set of 'work' friends and a 'work' community, which is supposed to complement your social life outside of Wharton."

But despite administrative enthusiasm, for some, like associate director of undergraduate leadership programs Helene Elting, the system "didn't have much of a presence in the class."

"On occasion, the cohort mentors would come in and talk about events, but it wasn't integrated into the class at all," she said.

"I'm not too sure that the cohort system needs to be fully integrated with the classroom," she said. "The cohort is more of a co-curricular experience, while the MGMT 100 class is mainly academic."

And, as the Class of 2011 enters, cohort administrators are hoping to add to the array of events.

Wharton sophomore Natalie Benoy, who served as a mentor for the Shekel cohort, said they "want to have a lot more activities for students toward the beginning of the year" next semester.

"Because it was a new initiative [last year], we didn't have the time to reach out during the summer and NSO," she said.

Officials also plan to continue the program for the Class of 2010 as it moves through its four years at Wharton.

"We have a few things imagined for the sophomore year, like a case competition," Kahn said. "For junior year, we're talking about an integrated simulation for the cohorts that requires all the business information that students have learned."

Eventually, officials hope to create relationships among cohorts across the four undergraduate classes, Benoy added. "We want to encourage people to make friends."

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